Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

He shrugged agreeably and beckoned me through the stage door. Not till we got to the speakeasy did I remember he might have trouble getting served, but the bartender seemed to know him. Even so, Walter hadn’t washed his face, though wherever he had the hint of wrinkles you could see his skin under the cracked cork. There we were: a black guy made up to look black and a Jewish guy dressed up as an old Jew. I almost laughed. I could taste the wax on my front teeth.

We carried our drinks to a table and sat down to play pinochle. Between hands, he wrote things on a notepad. Our first conversation. His handwriting was ornate. Where are you from? Iowa, I told him. Home! he wrote, and then he dealt the cards.

“After a fashion,” I said.

Lucky you. Haven’t seen my people in thirty years.

“No? Why not?”

He grimaced. Then he wrote, They won’t . He put the pencil on the table and pointed a long finger at his temple and shook his head.

“What?” I asked.

He tapped his ear, and shook his head more empathetically.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t get you.”

He sighed, silently of course, and picked up the pencil. He held it for a few minutes like it was a burning match he wanted to let singe his fingers, and then wrote, in big block letters, with none of the usual elegant flourish:

DEAF.

He pointed to himself.

I said, “You don’t seem so.”

Eyebrows up. A shake of the head. On the page, I read lips. Have since I was a child. A teacher showed me. Scares people.

“Scares people? Why?”

Either I can hear and am just pretending or it’s magic. So says my parents. They were frightened of me. He went back and crossed out were and changed it to are .

From his suit pocket he drew out an old picture on a gray cardboard backing, a theatrical shot from the end of the last century: himself, in full tramp dress, including what must have been a red nose, no cork, just a big shaggy false beard and a matching wig bristling out from under his stovepipe hat, the familiar look of educated seriousness on his face. His hands were full of rubber balls, and he offered one at the camera, as though it was the fruit of knowledge and he thought you better not take it, in case you became as wise and desperate and down at the heels as he. At the bottom of the cardboard it said, CUTTER THE GREAT COON JUGGLER — THE GENUINE ARTICLE.

He wrote on the pad, Me at fourteen . Then he picked up the picture and put it in my hand and gestured, For you.

“No,” I said, “I can’t take this.”

He pulled out several from his pocket, to show that he had plenty. I don’t know whether he’d sold them once upon a time or they were lobby cards, but it’s true they were outdated now. It was a weird gift, but one I wanted.

He wrote on his pad, though I hadn’t asked, Through my feet I feel the drums. That’s how I dance.

Farnsworth finally fired me that night, onstage — he made it a joke, I think to see if I’d go off in character. The audience figured I got axed this way every night. “Go back to Des Moines!” he bellowed, and I exited stage left, vowing that I wouldn’t. A local reference! The audience applauded. I walked straight out through the wings to the stage door and kept going, even though Farnsworth owned the dusty Hebe suit.

I thought of myself like Walter Cutter then, proud and downtrodden. I was so proud I would not take Walter’s advice, which came in the form of Lucky you . I wouldn’t go to Des Moines until vaudeville took me closer, and I could show my father I hadn’t made a terrible mistake. I planned my return, honest to God I planned it, but pride—

— not pride. I know that now. In my case it was cowardice, and in Walter’s case it was necessity, and that at twenty I thought we were going through similar things shows you what being twenty does to the brain. I isolated myself. I cast myself out. The tragedy of Adam and Eve, the reason we can love them, is their eviction. They had to leave, and they left weeping. They didn’t pack up and sneak away. That’s the ugliest thing in the world, I’ve come to believe, though at twenty I wasn’t done trying.

There’s an old bit — Abbott and Costello did it later on film, and the Three Stooges: two guys onstage, one of whom is driven insane by some words. Sometimes it’s Susquehanna Hat Company, sometimes Floogle Street . In the most famous version it’s Niagara Falls . When the straight man hears a certain set of unlikely words, he gets hypnotized and violent. He repeats the phrase in a strangled voice, and then he beats the comic. Then somehow the straight man catches hold of himself and pulls away. But the comic is a comic: if there’s something he shouldn’t do, he can’t help doing it. He says, “I ain’t gonna say those words again.” Straight man says, “What words?” Comic: “Niagara Falls.” And the beating starts again, and stops again, and starts.

When you travel alone, you pick up your own set of words. If asked, you’d say you never wanted to hear them again: Niagara Falls, Miriam, Mimi, Savant, Louisville, Valley Junction, Iowa . But that’s not true. You wish some innocent stranger would say them, so you can act in self-defense. You stare at people; you dare them to say the words. Comedy is not realistic: the straight man stops and lets the comic live, three, four, five times — he beats him silly but not bloody. In real life you wouldn’t stop, you’d keep pummeling until you’d thrashed those words right out of the world. They’d be gone, and you’d be the one who banished them.

I took the train back to Chicago, to try my luck at another talent show. From there, I got a job assisting a morphine-addicted magician who seemed bent on setting me on fire. Then suddenly I was in Duluth again, dancing alone in my boardinghouse to keep my legs up. Someone knocked at the door, and for a moment, still dancing, I imagined who it might be: Miriam, come to ask my forgiveness. Boris the seal, honking that fish tasted sweeter from my fingers than anyone else’s. Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, fighting over whether I’d be the headliner in the Follies or the Scandals.

It was the landlady, a red-nosed woman in a striped housecoat. “You’re keeping everyone awake,” she said. Then she thrust an envelope into my hand, a telegram from the hungry agent that said, Can you dance? Learn Pantages Minneapolis tomorrow .

Could I dance? I could fly. I packed my case and caught a train that night. “Lucky guy,” I told myself as we pulled out of Duluth, and then wondered when I’d started talking aloud. That is, I said, aloud, “When did you start talking to yourself?” The guy next to me sighed, then changed seats.

All the way to Minneapolis, I shined my shoes. When I got there, I had to dirty them up again, because the skinny guy in charge of the tab show wanted a Dutch comic who could dance — the one they’d booked had a bum appendix. He’d been taken to the hospital in his costume but left behind his wig. Afterward, I was fired again. The beginning of the end, I thought. Time to listen: vaudeville was dying. I should leave before it killed me too. I stood in the wings and watched the girls onstage, lovely in their skimpy costumes, the light off the umbrellas they turned hitting my face like rainwater. Maybe that’s why the agitated comic behind me — his straight man vomiting in somebody’s purse — noticed me. Probably I was just close up. He was a stout man whose suspenders seemed in danger of pulling his pants to his chin, and he was doing a small dance of impatience in the wings.

“You’ll do,” he said to me.